


natural born traveling man

by too_much_in_the_sun



Series: there's a room where the light won't find you [3]
Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Depression, Gen, Loneliness, Mental Health Issues, Navajo Character, The Desert
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-31
Updated: 2014-01-31
Packaged: 2018-01-10 16:12:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1161833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/too_much_in_the_sun/pseuds/too_much_in_the_sun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cecil makes a friend, and things begin to look up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	natural born traveling man

There is a voice singing in the darkness. But it's hard to hear under the trembly whistle of the wind over the desert, the chirp of insects, the roar of distant tires on the highway. So at first he does not know it is there.

Cecil is twelve. He has snuck out into the sand wastes after dinner, leaving his homework undone on his desk. It isn't like anyone will notice he isn't in his room like he's supposed to be, and he'll do the work when he gets back anyway. Right now he needs to be in the desert, away from people. He is huddled in a rockfield, trying to think as few of his own thoughts as he can.

He is twelve and next year he will move up to ninth grade at Night Vale High School. His friends will be there, Pamela and Steve and everyone else, but Pamela is fourteen already and Steve fifteen, and Cecil understands that what seems like so little difference in their ages on paper is the widest gulf in the world in practice. Steve can grow a mustache. When Cecil looks at himself in the mirror before his showers, he can count every single one of his ribs. He has exactly one chest hair, straight and black against the delicate brown of the skin just above his heart.

Cecil knows all about uranium mining and the Soviet Union, about weaving and why there were two world wars, but he doesn't understand how to get invited to parties, or how to join a conversation. Until recently, he didn't know that he didn't know; now it weighs on him, because he knows that other people do know these things, and they think he's weird because he doesn't. Other people make eye contact when they talk. Pamela likes to sit right next to him at lunchtime, her right arm right up against his left arm, and he doesn't like the sensation of another person so close to him. Sometimes Steve slaps him on the back with exuberant affection, and Cecil flinches from his touch.

His mother has never been physically affectionate with him or his brother, but Cecil is beginning to sense that something about him is wrong. He is not like the other students in his class. They pass notes during class. He sits and daydreams about the Monster-Killer Twins and Luke Skywalker. He pretends his hand is a dinosaur, stalking its prey along his desk. His pencils are spaceships or rockets, his pink erasers hovercars.

It's never bothered him before. He's always been dimly aware of his differences, but with every day he worries more that there's something wrong with him. His Uncle Jim tells him stories about skinwalkers and witches, and he wonders if this is what corpse sickness is like at the beginning. Has someone put a curse on him?

He comes out to the desert when worrisome thoughts chase after him, when the thought of his own death nips at his heels. It is easier to forget his troubles after hiking out past the edge of the town, easier to put emotional distance between himself and everyone else when Night Vale is a mile behind him. It is a full-moon night, and he thinks about vampires and werewolves, which are only skinwalkers with a different, English name. They say that some people don't even know they're werewolves, that they go about their lives never knowing that at certain times they become animals and run free in the night. It must be a sad way to live, he thinks, not knowing the truth of yourself. Better to know you are a terrible beast than to think you are normal.

The voice is gone. It sounded like one of the cactus women talking to herself, and she must have wandered off. There's a whole family of them, living happily out in the desert. According to Pamela they are all deadly beautiful women with proud Spanish features and dark, wavy hair, and if they look at you for too long, they can hypnotize or kill you. Cecil has met them three or four times, and he is pretty sure he has not been hypnotized. Cactus June, one of a set of triplets and the youngest of the clan at five, seems to think he is her older brother, or a benevolent desert spirit.

The cactus women have never been seen with men. It's said that, like some kinds of skink, they don't need men to reproduce. According to them, they are the daughters of cacti and the desert wind. They seem happy. But Cecil wonders if they would accept a cactus boy into their ranks. It might be better than high school.

He is worried about making that transition, he admits to himself. Some sand has worked its way into his sock, and he wriggles his toes idly. Middle school is hard enough, the difference between himself and everyone else so stark it is nearly painful. How much worse will high school be? When he finishes, he'll be sixteen, not even able to drive when everyone else is old enough to vote. Steve says he's going to join the Army when he graduates. Earl wants to be a truck driver. Cecil will be stuck in limbo at the very end of childhood.

In her rare moments of expressed affection, his mother tells him she is proud of her brilliant son. He reminds her of his grandfather, she says -- so far ahead of his classmates, so quiet, such a kind person.

When he asks about his father, she presses her lips together and says nothing.

In the photo album she keeps, their father is in only two photos at the very beginning. In one he is sitting at a bar, holding a beer, laughing. There's a dark stain on the sleeve of his flannel shirt, and his hair is buzzed very short. In the other picture, he wears nice pants, a white collared shirt, and a tie. He's holding an infant Cecil in his arms and looking straight into the camera. Cecil stares up at him.

His father was a white man. Sometimes Cecil looks at his skin and wonders if he and his brother were adopted. There's no way two boys with such brown skin could be the sons of a man the approximate color of rice. Maybe they were a science experiment smuggled out of Los Alamos -- when they were toddlers, they looked so much alike everyone thought they were twins.

The only thing Cecil knows his father left for the three of them is his name. His mother never changed hers to match his; she is still Karen Nidishchii', even though that's not exactly what it says on her driver's license.

But Cecil and his brother wear their father's last name, Palmer. He is afraid to ask why it is that way.

His father left the day Cecil turned one. His brother was three months old. It was a hot night, and their father left to get flour for bread and meat for the bloodstone circle. He did not come back after that, and that is all their mother will tell them.

Sometimes Cecil sits out here, in his spot in the shadow of a sandstone boulder, and as the sun slides down to the horizon he looks out across the scrubland and thinks about leaving. About putting one foot after another and walking west, to see what is beyond the little range of hills on that side of town. He wants to see the ocean, to wade into it hip-deep and feel the press of water against him, smell the salt, hear the crying birds. The desert has so little water to spare, and he wants to see where all the water is instead. To see if he will belong there.

He wonders if this need to wander comes from his father. Would he abandon his family to go walking west? Slip out of their lives like the fleeting shadow of a cloud?

The thing that frightens him is that he would do it. He is his father's son.

"Your place is here," says the voice from the darkness, and Cecil flinches. He becomes aware that the sand and pebbles have pressed into the palms of his hands, leaving little indentations in the skin like the texture of asphalt. Even in the bright light of the moon as it edges out from behind a cloud, he sees no one there.

"I'm here," says the voice, half-laughing. "You just can't see me yet."

"What are you looking for?" he asks, thinking about stories where the clever escape a monster by tricking it, out-talking it.

"You're very polite," it says, the sound coming from everywhere around him, from the boulder he leans on to the sand under his butt to the few faint stars overhead. "But I've already found it. I'm looking for you. And you can't out-trick a trickster, so don't try, or we'll be here all night."

"Why are you looking for me?" Cecil says. His voice breaks and shivers to a whisper. Fear makes his stomach tight and small. The hair on the back of his neck, under his braid, is trying to stand on end but not getting far.

"Night Vale needs you. Or it will need you, in about twenty years. That's when I'm supposed to come get you, but I thought, since I was in town, we might as well make our introductions early." The voice sounds like his own, the way his thoughts sound inside his head. Is he going insane?

"Why would Night Vale need me?" His voice won't go above a whisper. The sandstone is still a little warm against his back, like the hand of a ghost.

"It doesn't, yet. But it will." The voice sounds kind, like Uncle Jim when Cecil goes to visit him in his hogan out on county road 19. Uncle Jim always understands when Cecil shows up alone, his jeans covered in red sandstone dust from walking across the desert.

"Why will it need me?"

"I can't actually tell you that," the voice muses. "But right now I'm here because you need guidance. Think of me as, what's the word..."

"A spirit guide?" Cecil croaks. The idea is familiar from English class, of all places, though it isn't a very English idea.

"That'll do." There's a short, barking laugh. "I'm not supposed to even show myself to you until you're twenty-one, but why break the rules once when you can break them twice, right?"

This is it, Cecil thinks calmly. He's finally lost his mind. He's hearing voices like crazy people do; _ipso facto_ , he is crazy.

There's a scrub oak stand about ten feet in front of his boulder, and it begins to shake violently, as if harried by a windstorm, branches swaying to and fro. Lightning cracks down from the sky, and he throws his arm across his eyes, too late to prevent the blinding afterimage as the scrub oak begins to burn furiously.

There's no thunder, and he drops his arm, blinking to clear the green afterimage still hanging in front of him. The scrub oak burns merrily, sap cracking and popping in the heat.

And out of the wall of flame trots a coyote, tongue hanging from its mouth, ears pricked forward. It stops when its paws are nearly touching his boots, play-bows to him, and circles around to his left side.

"Yes, that's better," says the coyote, and the dark, oozing fear crawls up from the bottom of him to drag him down. He cannot resist it. He's going insane. There's no way now for him to prove himself good enough, to prove himself normal.

There's a bright, terrible ring of pain around his left wrist, and he gasps as his eyes snap open. The coyote has fastened on to him, white teeth sunk into his flesh, and as he watches, paralyzed, it opens its jaws and licks its teeth.

Then it backs away, one step and then two.

"Sorry about that," it says. "You're not losing your mind, by the way. I'm just as real as the Sheriff's Secret Police, or the hooded figures, or, unfortunately, Ronald Reagan. Or you."

Cecil grabs his left wrist with his right hand, thinking something about trying to stop the bleeding. But while the wound is slick under his hand, it's not pumping out blood like he expected from the force of the bite. "Who are you?" he asks, and his voice quavers.

It blinks. In the light of the burning scrub oak he can see its eyes very clearly. They are vivid green -- he grasps for an adjective, and all he can think is the aftermath of the Trinity test. All the sand flash-fused to trinitite, deadly, lovely green.

"You're a smart kid. I thought you'd guess," it says. "My name is Coyote."

"Please don't kill me," Cecil pleads. Meetings between gods and humans never end well for the human. This is the aggregate of every story he has ever heard about the matter.

"I'm not going to kill you," it -- Coyote -- says with a grin, jaws open to show its fangs. The gesture is much more threatening on a wild predator than a tame dog. "Sorry about the biting. I have to do it. The blood'll be gone by the time you get home."

Cecil is speechless, clutching his wrist to his chest. It's probably bleeding on his shirt, but he really doesn't care.

"Don't be afraid," Coyote says quietly, padding closer to him until his nose almost bumps against Cecil's. His breath is hot on Cecil's face, and smells of ancient spices and dusty cinnamon.

"I'm not afraid," Cecil whispers. A plume of smoke rises from the scrub oak into the night air. It smells like ash and ozone.

"Not of me. Of them." He bumps Cecil's nose with his muzzle. "You're worth much more than you know. Don't let high school get you down."

"I wasn't!" Cecil protests. He was.

Coyote sniffs, partly in disdain and probably partly to get his scent. "There's nothing wrong with you. You are important, and it doesn't matter if you can't grow a beard and your buddy can. You are valuable, and you are needed in this world."

Cecil's never had anyone say something like that to him. It seems to fill a hole he didn't know was there.

"Also," Coyote adds, "you're bound to me by blood."

"I'm what?"

Coyote blinks once. "Your father is not your father," he says mysteriously.

"Are you my dad?" Cecil says softly. He's thought about meeting his dad, but he never imagined this.

Coyote barks laughter. At close range it's slightly deafening, and Cecil winces. "Sorry. But no. You can call me Uncle if you like."

Cecil is silent. The blood is drying tackily on his arm, where it's run down in rivulets, and he picks it off with his fingernails, letting the flakes flutter to the ground.

"Why am I so important?" he says after what feels like about a thousand years but is probably only a minute. It seems much longer with Coyote staring at him unblinking.

"Do you know what it means to be the Voice of Night Vale?" says Coyote.

"Yeah, that's the guy who runs the radio station." Leonard. He knows all the best jokes and has better taste in music than anyone Cecil knows, and even though Cecil's never met him, he feels as though the two of them are friends.

"That's the one," Coyote says. "In about ten years that's going to be your job. And ten years after that you're going to meet someone very important. Also you'll need to make sure Night Vale isn't destroyed, but those two things aren't necessarily related."

"Do I get to meet Indiana Jones?" Cecil asks. He doesn't really want to meet the President, but meeting Indiana Jones would be pretty neat.

Coyote blinks slowly again. Cecil rarely looks in mirrors -- what he sees there never looks like him -- but he notices that Coyote's eyes look a lot like his. _Exactly_ like his, golden flecks and all.

"No. And I can't tell you who it is." He grins, tongue flopping slightly out of his mouth. "But I can tell you that he's going to have _perfect_ hair."

**Author's Note:**

> If I take about eight thousand years to post the next chapter, I'm sorry. It's a bad habit. 
> 
> This is part of a loose series where Coyote exists in Night Vale, godly powers and all, and enjoys meddling in the lives of its citizens. Said fics so far are this one, "[felis cattus nightvalicus](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1157460)", [friendship and fate](http://archiveofourown.org/works/991439)", and "[the way you trouble mine](http://archiveofourown.org/works/978750)", and I am at this moment tagging them all together as "Coyote tales" because I'm uncreative.
> 
> Commentary is greatly appreciated, especially if it's "dude, you missed a huge typo", because I wrote this in Notepad like the fool I am.


End file.
